Into The Fire jb-4

by David Wiltse

  "We keep them, the actual papers that is, until they send out the latest microfilm. That's at least eighteen months. I suppose it could be two years in some libraries if they aren't too quick about getting rid of the old copies.

  Space is a problem here, we're just too small until we get our new addition built."

  "So some libraries might have them?"

  "Oh, surely some would, somewhere. Or of course people save them, individuals, I mean. In attics and garages. I don't know why."

  "Sentimental value?" Becker asked ironically.

  "I suppose. Or neurosis. There are an awful lot of screwballs around."

  "Yes," said Becker. "I know."

  "Oh, don't bother with that," she said as Becker started to remove the film from the machine. "I'll take care of that."

  When he was safely out the door, June sat down at the microfilm machine and read the page that had caused Becker to blanch and stare as though at an apparition. For a moment, as she had watched him from across the room, he had become so inert, so preternaturally absorbed, that she wondered if something might have happened to him.

  When he finally came out of it she had the fleeting impression of a man bursting to the surface of the water, gasping for breath.

  There was no trouble finding the story, Becker had turned the focus onto it until it filled most of the screen.

  It caused no reaction in her. Just another dreadful story in a world that had become replete with mayhem. And West Virginia seemed so far away from the suburban comforts of Fairfield County, Connecticut. She wondered what it could have to do with Becker. From all she had heard, he was retired. it's none of my business, Becker told himself angrily.

  I didn't want-it, didn't ask for it. I am no more responsible for it than the woman who picks up a phone and hears a heavy breather panting in her ear. I am the victim, he thought. I am being defiled by this obscenity sent through the mail. And forwarded to me by the Bureau. They don't want to protect my privacy, of course. What they want is to get me involved. They would like nothing better than for me to get stiffed up by some random lunatic and come back to work to solve a case that would lead to another case and another and another until he was back in their clutches again, their leash around his neck, their special ferret to be sent down into every vile-smelling hole could find in a nation burgeoning with homicidal madmen.

  To hell with it, Becker said, to hell with the Bureau, to hell with his correspondent. He put everything back in the manila envelope and tossed it into the pile of old tax returns Karen kept in the closet of the family room. Out of sight, out of mind, he told himself, knowing it wasn't true.

  As the Apostolic Choir of the Holy Ghost whipped itself into its nightly frenzy of syncopated devotion, the Reverend Tommy R. Walker peered through the curtain to view his congregation to see how well they were responding to the Apostolic's enthusiasm. To his dismay, they appeared to be the usual collection of deadheads, whiners, and malcontents come to witness a miracle or two and not about to be diverted by a mixed dozen of black-and-maroon-robed overweight men and women singing their tonsils out. They could get that sort of thing at regular church. What they had come for tonight was something out of your ordinary run-of-the-mill preaching and spiritualizing. They had come to see the wonders of the Lord as performed personally and with that special panache that was the trademark of the good reverend himself. They wanted curing, they wanted laying on of hands, they damned well expected to witness the laine walking and the blind seeing again, not to mention the cleansing of souls and soothing of troubled spirits and the odd elimination of tumorous growths and palsied afflictions. They had come to Bald Nob on this particular night anticipating just about every miracle and living proof of the Holy Spirit that man could conjure up from a cooperative divinity, short of finding them all permanent employment.

  All of which Reverend Tommy would deliver, of course, because that's what he was good at. Still, it wouldn't hurt his efforts if they got off their hands and enthused a bit ahead of time instead of sitting there, staring at the Apostolics as if all that melodic yelling was nothing more than a collective reaction to seeing a mouse.

  Expecting Reverend Tommy to do all the work. As per usual.

  Having sized them up in general as the normal bunch of small-town, farm-country, tight-assed pinchpennies, Tommy turned his attention to his congregations in particular, seeking out the diseased and dim-witted whom he would heal that night. Down front, where he had positioned her in one of Tommy's three wheelchairs-he needed more but they were surprisingly expensive-was the lady with the bad shoulder whom he would cause to leap from her wheelchair and walk again. Next to her, looking as if he really needed the wheelchair, sat an elderly man with a portable oxygen tank and tubes feeding into his nose. Tommy figured the man could get along without the oxygen long enough for him to remove the tubes and praise the Lord for a moment or two. They almost always could unless they were in a hospital bed under an oxygen tent. But then the Reverend Tommy R. Walker didn't heal in hospitals.

  What Tommy was looking for more specifically were the members of the audience whom he could not cure, that is to say, in whom he could not reliably muster a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. He had pointed out the mean-faced farmer with the fiery rash running down his face and under his shirt. He was the kind of man who would clutch at the Reverend Tommy, strong enough not to be pushed off with Tommy's patented forehead just, angry enough to demand proof of his cure, loud enough to protest when the rash didn't vanish. And an affliction like that was so damnably visible that there was no way to fake its removal. At least Tommy had not yet devised a way to fake it. The farmer would continue to glow strawberry red clear to the back of the tent unless Rae pulled the switch and killed the lights entirely. It was much easier to avoid the man in the first place. Let him be dealt with in the general heal-off when Tommy went down the line, thrusting Satan from foreheads with the speed and impersonality of an athlete administering high fives following a winning play.

  The Apostolic Choir groaned their final notes to an unenthusiastic round of applause, the deacon/director taking too many bows, as usual, so that he was still bobbing his head in false modesty several seconds after the crowd had slumped back again into silence. Rae took the stage and began her warm-up, extolling the virtues of Jesus and the Reverend Tommy R.

  Walker in more or less equal parts and doing her damndest to lather the people up a bit in anticipation. The problem was, Rae's damndest was no damned good. She was no public speaker, and that was a fact. The Reverend Tommy did not wish to be unchristian about it, but Rae had no more charisma than a dead sheep.

  She was good working the audience as they came inher simple country manner put them at ease and her naturally sympathetic response allowed them to confide in her like a friend-but a friend was not what you wanted up onstage. What you wanted up onstage was somebody who could tie a knot in their tails and make them like it, and tail-knotting was not something people took to from a woman who usually reminded them of their plainlooking cousin who was such a good listener. Rae was a hard worker, sincere, loyal as a tick hound but not much smarter and consequently not too demanding in a variety of ways. In a not totally unrelated matter, her breasts had begun to droop unappetizingly. That was a deficit that could be corrected easily enough onstage when she had the benefit of undergarments, but not in the Reverend Tommy's bed, where he liked his women naked and sweating and loud and young. Rae was never very loud, either, come to that.

  When Rae reached the part about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead and implying-though never claiming outright-that the Reverend Walker was very nearly up to such a feat himself, a latecomer slipped into the back of the tent. She was wearing faded denims and a man's workshirt and sporting a face that Tommy thought looked like an angel. Or, if there were such things as angels, that's what Tommy thought they ought to look like. At least that's how they should look if they wanted to recruit any male souls.

  He would have liked to study her
more, but Rae had come to the conclusion of her introduction, straining up on her toes-the only way she knew to indicate total enthusiasm-and the choir was bursting into ecstatic noises and the electric piano was playing and the tambourines were nnging and Tommy checked to be sure his fly was zipped and clutched his golden Bible in his hand and hurled himself through the curtain and onto the stage, shouting praises to the Lord.

  The Reverend Tommy was a quick and prolific sweater, a curse during his teenaged years, particularly when in pursuit of girls, but turned nicely into an asset in his Bible-thumping, crowd-working career. An average man could prowl the stage and wave his arms and testify for the Lord for a good long while before he began to perspire, but Tommy would break into a sweat within the first few minutes and it would pour off his face and under his arms and down his back so that his shirt would stick to him and his hair would turn as stringy and lank as if he had just been in the river. He looked, he would sometimes joke, as if he had baptized himself right there onstage without the aid of anybody else's water. The audiences responded to the effect because it made it look as if he was wrestling with the devil in a mighty and powerful way, and they figured that any man with that — much natural internal heat could surely spare some healing warmth for them.

  A sallow man, his complexion looked even whiter when contrasted with the coal blackness of his hair and massively bushy eyebrows that met in the middle atop the the bridge of his nose. His hair had always been as black as tar and Tommy took some cosmetic pains to keep it that way now that nature wanted to sprinkle it with gray.

  The combination of light and dark was even more pronounced under the dim lights within the tent-it was easier to perform miracles in the gloom than in broad daylight-and at times, to the more devoted and imaginative of his audience, he seemed to be lit by an inner light. Others, if they could have articulated their perceptions, would have said the combination looked more satanic than holy, but who was ungrateful enough to question the source of healing?

  Tonight neither sweating nor his complexion nor his tireless thumping and pounding and exhorting and top-of the-register prayer were having the desired effect. The citizens of Bald Nob just weren't sensing the presence of, the holy spirit among them, and Tommy was feeling a bit of panic. Lately, audiences had been getting worse, although he didn't remember any of them being quite this moribund. He blamed the perfidious influence of television. They could find a good shouting and praying and healing just about every week on the tube, and with altogether better production values than Tommy could muster. The television ministers would even heal long distance-all one had to do was huddle up close to that TV set and feel the medicinal touch coming right at them through the airwaves. For a donation of suitable size, the evangelist would even mention the viewer's name and affliction during his broadcast, offering personalized service in the privacy of his own living room but within earshot of millions. That sort of thing made audiences entirely too passive, yet too demanding. There was no substitute for the actual contact with a human hand as offered by the Reverend Tommy R. Walker, but it had become increasingly difficult to convince an audience of that. Tommy would have killed for a chance to go on television himself, of course, but in the meantime, television was killing him.

  From the corner of his eye he saw the girl with the angel's face start to move. He had kept track of her during his orating, staring at her as much as he could allow himself while still turning his charms and attentions on the whole crowd. She had seemed from a distance to be smirking at him, but the lights were at their dimmest in the back of the tent and Tommy could not be sure. He was trying to devise a way of meeting her after the show and wiping that smirk off her face at the same time he relieved her of her clothing, and it might well be that his split focus accounted in part for his lack of success with the rest of the audience. Spellbinding required a good deal of attention to the business at hand as well as great energy.

  For a second he feared that she was moving towards the exit, but then he realized that she was coming down the aisle towards him. He had not called for the afflicted to come forth yet, and her movement caught the attention of the audience. Now they were looking at her, their interest caught more by the beautiful girl than by his spellbinding, and, damn it, that was just the kind of thing that could make him have to start all over again.

  She stopped right at the edge of the stage, standing next to the wheelchair of the lady with the bad shoulder.

  "Reverend Tommy," she said.

  Tommy tried to ignore her and kept right on preaching as if she didn't exist, weren't there right in front of him, the cynosure of the whole damned crowd of gawking rubes.

  "Reverend Tommy," she cried again, this time louder, and with her arms reaching out to him. There was no ignoring her now and, God help him, this time he had heard her voice, the garbled noise of a severe speech impediment. Vocal problems were the worst. You could get a cripple to stand for a second or two and you could sometimes induce a flash of light for the blind if you pushed on the eyeball-or you could make him think you did-but there was no way someone with a cleft palate was going to shout "Praise the lord" in tones that were suddenly round and intelligible. The whole damned audience could hear the afflicted was still afflicted, no matter what the afflicted thought about himself.

  "Heal me," the beautiful girl was saying, or at least Tommy guessed that was what she was saying. Even as he was trying to figure a way out of this, Tommy could not help but feel anger that such a lovely woman would be given such a hardship to bear. She was young, looked to be no more than eighteen, with her whole life to face with a mouth that could never pronounce her thoughts.

  Tommy looked around for help but Rae was frozen in the wings, as surprised as he was, and the choir, who doubled as security and general calmer-downers as well as the catchers of his healing thrusts, were standing there mesmerized, their tambourines dangling. The deacon was only now beginning to stir, but it would take him far too long to get to the girl and get her out of the way. This creature was just too pretty for the audience to dismiss and forget about. They wanted her by God cured and no nonsense, and Tommy could feel the force of their demand as he crossed to the edge of the stage.

  She held her arms up to him as if offering herself to a saint. Tommy started to kneel down to her, hoping to work something out of sight of most of the audience, but she grabbed his arm and pulled herself up onstage, giving him no choice but to make it look as if that was what he wanted. Short of kicking her back into the audience, there was no way out but to deal with her.

  "Heal me, Reverend Tommy, I know you can. I know you can," she said, or some such garble. Tommy could hear the audience "awwing" in sympathy with her defect.

  The poor young thing, they thought, and so pretty, too.

  "I am going to heal you, sister," Tommy said loudly.

  She started to make some more noise, but Tommy clamped his hands on her face, closing her jaw to shut her up. She was just as beautiful up close, and even in the midst of his panic Tommy wondered if he couldn't just kiss her back to health right here and now.

  The Reverend Tommy was about to say that he was more than willing to heal her once he got to the healing portion of the show when she winked at him.

  Startled, Tommy reflexively yelled, "Satan be gone!" and pushed the girl away from him and off — the stage, forgetting in his astonishment that his catchers were not yet in place.

  The girl was nimble and landed on her feet but staggered a bit and doubled over as if caught in a seizure of some sort. Her body quivered a bit and for a second TOMMY wondered if he had done her some sort of neurological damage. But it was her fault, scaring him that way. What was she thinking of.?

  Amid a great hush, the girl slowly straightened up.

  Tommy thought of leaping back into his preaching to cover up whatever devilment came out of her mouth now, but he knew the audience would not forgive him if he did.

  She looked up at Tommy, this time half-lifting her arms in a po
se reminiscent of the Pope, her eyes gazing worshipfully at him on the stage. Her face was flushed with the spirit in a way that Tommy had not seen in years, and when she spoke, her voice was filled with awe.

  "Thank you, Reverend Tommy," she said. Her tones were soft but clear as a diction teacher's, every syllable precise.

  "Thank God," said Tommy, half in wonder himself at the transformation.

  "Praise be," she agreed, then, in a voice filled with tears but resonating with all the joy the Apostolic Choir strove for but never achieved, "Praise Jesus"'

  Tommy stared at her in amazement as the audience erupted.

  "His wonders to perform," she cried.

  The audience was on its feet, yelling and screaming in appreciation.

  "And his servant, Tommy R. Walker!"

  Oh, they loved him then, but they loved her even more.

  Nothing like seeing perfection restored. Tommy watched her hold them, lift them and shake them. At that moment she could have had their wallets just for the asking and they would have blessed her for taking them. She was the best he had ever seen.

  And it was the best night he had had in months.

  His punk was crying again, trying to hide it, as if you could hide anything in a cell. He was in his bunk over Cooper's head, weeping and sniffing and answering "nothing" — whenever Cooper asked what was wrong.

  Cooper knew what was wrong, though. The punk was crying because Cooper was leaving in the morning.

  "You'll be all right," Cooper said, not at all certain that it was true.

  Swann's new cellmate might turn out to be someone not as nice as Cooper.

  Or, worse, he might turn out to be someone like Swann himself, someone who could offer Swann no protection against the other predators. His punk could turn out to be free meat. Cooper had seen others in that position ripped apart, torn into bits like a piece of steak thrown in among the lions. They wouldn't show him the kind of consideration Cooper had, they wouldn't talk to him and make him feel like a human being the way Cooper had always strived to do.